Hart's War (2002)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

This is a film in desperate search of a genre. It starts off as a classic WW2 thriller, with German ambushes in a snowy landscape and plenty of twists and turns within a short time. It moves into POW camp territory, with varying factions vying for power in a prison territory. Not content to stay there, HART'S WAR then turns into a murder mystery (with added racial commentary) before finally setting on its path as a courtroom drama for the rest of the running time.The veering from genre to genre gives the film a bit of a disjointed feel, but for the most part I could forgive that because I found this to be an entertaining movie. Colin Farrell, back when he was making an effort to break into stardom and teamed up with bigger actors (Bruce Willis in this, Tom Cruise in MINORITY REPORT), doesn't put a foot wrong and Willis has the liberty to steal all of his scenes as the gruff, grizzled colonel. I've always liked Terrence Howard, too, and he bags a meaty role here.The film isn't always engaging. Some of it, those cross-over bits inbetween the various genre bits, are rather dull, and there are a few too many CGI warplanes for my liking. But come the end, I was caught up in the story and the characters were the thing that kept me watching, especially as the latter moral dilemma plays out. Okay, so the excruciatingly sentimental ending (yes, it's as bad as the end of LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING) is way over the top, but until then HART'S WAR does its job and makes a refreshing change of pace from the usual wartime heroics.

This is one of the most disappointing movies I have ever seen, the reason I say this is because it started out really awesome and then slowly turned into a terrible movie that is totally forgettable. I would say that the movie is actually really good up to the point when the African-American prisoners are brought into the prisoner of war camp and then what started out as a really interesting movie about the conditions of POW's in WWII turns into some kind of misguided statement about racism. In the end, I couldn't really understand what kind of statement or message this movie was trying to make. On the one hand it seemed to be about the inequality of US soldiers during WWII but on the other hand that whole thing was just a cover-up for some clandestine sabotage operation. The ending was completely unbelievable but by that point I didn't care because I wanted to watch a "War" movie not a courtroom drama about racism that was just a sideshow to hide an operation that no one, watching the movie, knows about until the very end(and it wasn't one of those "wow, what a cool endings" either, it was just a "WTF just happened?" ending that was stupid. I seriously doubt that this movie was an accurate portrayal of how POW's, even of different races, would treat one another.Conclusion, to make a long post even longer ;), This movie starts out really good and you think you are about to see a really awesome WWII movie but instead you have been tricked and what you end up with is a boring courtroom drama that in then in is completely meaningless because it was just a cover-up for some larger goal, and top off the stupidity the unarmed Bruce Willis character walks unopposed back into the prison camp, through the front gate...seriously, and basically let's himself get killed. This movie makes me mad because from the beginning you can tell this thing had potential and then someone, I guess the writers and director just quit caring about making sense and just told a complete fiction and nothing even remotely close to a good fictional WWII movie like "Inglorious Basterds".

Since about 1975, films about World War II have not been as popular as they were in the three decades following the end of the conflict, although there have been occasional attempts to resurrect the genre. "Hart's War", dating from 2002, represents a return to a particular sub-genre of the war film, the prisoner of war drama once represented by the likes of "The Wooden Horse", "The Colditz Story" "Bridge on the River Kwai" and "The Great Escape".The action takes place in the winter of 1944/45. The title character is Lieutenant Thomas Hart, a young American officer captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and taken to a prisoner of war camp. In civilian life Hart was a law student at Yale, and although he is not yet a qualified lawyer he is ordered by Colonel William McNamara, the senior American officer in the camp, to undertake the defence of Lieutenant Lincoln Scott, a black airman accused of murder. (The German Commandant has agreed that Scott may have a court-martial under American military law).The murdered man was Sergeant Vic Bedford, a racist with a vicious hatred of blacks, and it is assumed that Scott killed him in revenge for his part in the death of another black officer, Lieutenant Archer. (Archer was shot by the Germans after a tent spike, which could be used as a weapon, was found in his bunk, and Scott believes that Bedford planted it there). Scott, however, denies responsibility for Bedford's death and Hart sets about defending him to the best of his ability. Hart, however, becomes suspicious of McNamara, who is acting as president of the court, and begins to believe that he may have his reasons for wanting Scott found guilty. A complicating factor is that Hart suffers from feelings of guilt after revealing intelligence to the Germans under interrogation.Traditional POW movies could be divided into two categories. The first category, like "The Wooden Horse", were pure adventure stories concentrating on the theme of escape. The second, exemplified by the likes of "Bridge on the River Kwai" or "King Rat", were character-driven dramas which concentrated on more serious themes. Some, like "The Great Escape", included elements of both types."Hart's War" is another film which attempts to straddle both categories. In the first half it appears to be a psychological character drama concentrating on the theme of racism in the US military. This could have been an interesting subject. Black servicemen joined the Armed Forces to serve a country which treated them as second-class citizens in peacetime, only to find that they were treated as third-class citizens in wartime by their white brothers-in-arms, who often hated them more than they did the enemy.This first half is well done; we get to see that Bruce Willis (as McNamara) can play something other than "Die Hard" type action heroes and we get a good sense of the hardships suffered by the POWs at this time. With the war almost over, Germany was desperately short of food and virtually everything else, and feeding enemy prisoners was not a high priority of the Nazi leadership, especially as the winter of 1944/45 was a particularly hard one. (I did, however, think it was unlikely that the German authorities would tolerate the prisoners putting on a show which openly mocked their country and the Nazi leadership).Unfortunately, the film goes downhill in the second half as it turns from a study of racism into an escape story. We learn, among other revelations, that McNamara knows full well that Scott is innocent, because he killed Bedford, an informer for the Germans, himself. Unknown to Hart and the other participants, the trial is merely an elaborate charade to cover up a plan by McNamara and a group of other prisoners to escape and destroy a nearby munitions plant, and McNamara seems unconcerned that this charade might result in the execution of an innocent man.This part of the film became unconvincing and difficult to follow; there is an attempt at a discussion of the meaning of duty and the ethics of war, but this is too muddled to be really enlightening. "Hart's War" is one of those films which starts strongly but finishes weakly, and in this it resembles the Robert Redford vehicle "The Last Castle", another film from the early 2000s about soldiers in captivity. It is in nothing like the class of the great POW dramas such as "The Great Escape" or "Bridge on the River Kwai". 5/10

I knew the leading actor, that this was a war film, and how many stars the critics gave it, but it was up to me to try it, from director Gregory Hoblit (Frequency, Untraceable). Set in World War II, law student Lt. Thomas W. Hart (Colin Farrell) is captured by the Germans after a battle and put in a German Stalag Prison camp. He joins many other POWs (Prisoner of War), including the troops led by Col. William A. McNamara (Bruce Willis), quietly waiting to pounce on the enemy, and escape the camp. Soon the soldiers are joined by two African American pilots who from a crashed plane, Lt. Lincoln A. Scott (Terrence Howard) and Lt. Lamar T. Archer (Vicellous Reon Shannon), and the other take an instant racist dislike. In the middle of the night, Archer is murdered, giving McNamara the chance to get his plans in motion, but obviously Hart wants to find the man guilty. When Scott is accused of the murder, Hart demands a court case to both find him innocent and prove it was a white man responsible. Of course Hart doesn't realise the murder is a cover up to get an escape under way, and when McNamara is discovered as the murderer, it is hard to end the case. But in the end, the escape plan is discovered, and Col. Werner Visser (Marcel Iures) holds McNamara fully responsible, which of course he is, and allows himself to get shot, Scott is found innocent, and of course three months later the war ends. Also starring Cole Hauser as Staff Sgt. Vic W. Bedford, Linus Roache as Capt. Peter A. Ross, Rory Cochrane as Sgt. Carl S. Webb and Michael Weston as Pfc. W. Roy Potts. I can see what the critics mean with Willis not being used enough, Farrell makes a reasonable lead with his not too bad American accent, and Iures gets his moments as the German Lt., it's not a brilliant war film, but you can try it if you want to. Worth watching, at least once!